Custom Invitations for a Fun Group of Friends

This project is by far one of my all-time favorites: a design for custom party invitations, which included original watercolor illustrations I made special to convey a spooky, but still cute, theme for a Halloween Bunco party (Bunco is a popular social dice game). Every year, Padie (my mom), along with the other women in her Bunco group, each host a Bunco party during one particular month. Padie selected October and asked me early in the year if I would work with her to come up with custom party invitations that would not only portray the spooky fun to be had at her Halloween Bunco party and inspire her friends to attend in costume, but also, give everyone a story to remember as part of the custom party invitations experience.

We started brainstorming ideas, and it was clear right away that furry and feathered woodland creatures would need to be front and center in the design. Armed with the notes from our meetings, I started sketching characters and researching animals I could work into my drawings. After coming up with several rough pencil sketches of various woodland animals in Halloween costumes and the like, I settled on the cast of characters featured here: a squirrel, a rabbit, a deer and an owl. The final pencil drawings complete, I then got to work painting each character in watercolor shades that fit the fall theme. I painted a nighttime background, too, so that our woodland trick-or-treaters would appear on the invitation as part of a finished Halloween scene. After everything was scanned and printed, I printed out another copy of the three main characters, carefully cutting and affixing them by hand to the printed background (using foam squares). This pop-up technique makes these custom party invitations stand WAY out!

The slideshow above shows several character drawings that I worked on for a client needing fun, approachable graphics for a future website project centered on online customer service. These characters were to be in the form of cartoon-like illustrations that fit specific character profiles the client provided, including the ones displayed here: Developer, Designer, Copywriter, Digital Advertising Pro, Digital Marketer, Mobile Expert, Social Media Pro and Concierge.

After receiving a brief description of each character, including the look and feel the illustration should portray, I went to work sketching different versions of the characters off the top of my head. In general, the drawings were to be friendly, appealing, professional and diverse. Most were to be donning a bow tie (per the client’s direction). There were other initial sketches that came before the ones you see here. After some revising and minor modifications, the final pencil sketches were put into vector format and completed in Illustrator with my Wacom tablet. Since childhood, I have never grown tired of drawing characters of all shapes and sizes. In short, this project was truly an enjoyable exercise for me! (Note: image color to be added to this particular project at the client’s discretion.)